A four-year investigation by the ABC has uncovered shocking claims of abuse and torment in relation to NSW-based registered charity and religious group Christian Assemblies International (CAI).

Four Corners has revealed that self-styled religious guru Pastor Scott Williams was using his warped brand of evangelical Pentecostalism to run a clandestine homosexual sex ring while allegedly misusing vast amounts of member donations for personal use.

Courageous former members broke their silence and told of their torment living inside the group, which they said is not a Christian church but a horrendous cult run by one man.
The ex-members have remained in the shadows until now out of fear and shame. They detailed shocking acts of abuse ranging from spiritual abuse, financial abuse, verbal and physical abuse, and the sexual abuse of adult men.

They said bizarre sexual rituals were carried out in secret by Williams, who described himself as “The Anointed One” with the Lord’s authorisation to sidestep biblical commands against homosexuality and sexually train his male members into submission and obedience….

Former members say they were recruited by Williams as teenagers and young adults, with many still at school. They say they were brainwashed into believing Williams was The Anointed One, filled with the Holy Spirit and gifted with the divine power of healing…..
Katja’s husband, Steve, says women were treated as less than men.
“Women were second-rate citizens,” he said. “They were there to have children and stand in the kitchen and make food.”

Using biblical scripture, Williams also preached that children were born evil and that the evil had to beaten out of them with an iron rod.

Official campus statistics for sexual violence mislead
A school with a lower rate may just be better at discouraging students from reporting assault
July 14, 2014 by Jennifer J. Freyd

Last month, The Washington Post released a compilation of reported rates of campus sexual assault nationwide. Such reports, which colleges and universities are required to release each year, are generally thought to be useful to the public. Parents of college-bound high school students who read that School A has a higher rate of reported sexual violence than School B can make more informed decisions about where their children will be safest. And they might very reasonably think that School A is a more dangerous school. However, the higher rate of reported sexual violence at School A likely indicates the opposite: that it is actually safer than School B. It means that School A is making it possible for — even encouraging — students to report sexual violence.

As a social scientist researching campus sexual violence, I know that even the highest rates of official reported victimization on campuses are substantially lower than what social science data suggest are the real rates of sexual assault. The best national estimate is that approximately 1 in 5 women experience sexual violence in college. But the reported rates are nothing like this, even at those colleges with the highest rates.

Why? Victims of abuse are often reticent about making official reports because they fear the consequences, including being stigmatized or not being believed. This tendency to remain silent is then amplified by institutional barriers to reporting. Colleges and universities have a perverse incentive to discourage sexually victimized students from reporting assault, due to the reputational hit colleges experience if their reported rates of violence are higher than those of their competitors. It’s a profoundly dangerous status quo, because encouraging reporting is one of the key ways colleges can make campuses safer.

Institutional cover-ups
Part of the challenge of tackling campus sexual assault is that sexual abuse typically starts in adolescence, prior to the beginning of college. Perpetrators have often been victimized themselves. Many college victims also have a prior history of abuse. These are important factors that my laboratory has studied for years. Ultimately we must address the underlying society-wide problem of child sexual abuse that contributes to college sexual violence. But in the meantime, college campuses offer a remarkable intervention point for sexual assault: They have resources. They are limited in number (thousands of institutions of higher education versus millions of families, for instance). They influence young people on the cusp of adult responsibility.

But only when such violence is reported can victims access services and colleges hold perpetrators accountable. For most colleges and universities, however, discouraging reporting appears to remain the norm. Colleges can make it difficult to determine how to report; they can also make life harder for students who do report by shaming, invalidating and even punishing them. This is why the reported rates likely tell us more about the campus climate than about underlying rates of sexual violence.
When schools discourage reporting, they collude with many societal forces to cover up sexual violence. Sexual violence thrives on secrecy; if students do not feel they can safely report, the assaults will continue unchecked….http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/college-campus-sexualassaultsafetydatawhitehousegender.html

Survivorship is pleased to announce our 2014 conference: “Survivors Supporting Survivors,” May 17 – 18, 2014 at the Executive Inn & Suites in Oakland, CA. The 2014 conference honors the 25th anniversary of Survivorship, the longest established organization in the country serving survivors of mind control and ritual abuse.

The conference Keynote Speaker is Jennifer Freyd, Ph.D. The topic of her talk is: What we have learned about Interpersonal and Institutional Betrayal Trauma.

Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD, is Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. She received her BA in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D in Psychology from Stanford University. Professor Freyd directs a laboratory investigating the impact of interpersonal and institutional trauma on mental and physical health, behavior, and society. She has published over 150 articles and she is author of the award-winning Harvard Press book Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse and she co-edited with Anne DePrince the volume, Trauma & Cognitive Science. Her new co-authored book Blind to Betrayal was published in English by John Wiley & Sons in March 2013. It has been translated into Traditional Chinese and Portuguese. Additional translations of her Blind to Betrayal into Simple Chinese, Russian, and Korean are in process. Freyd has received numerous honors including the Award for Outstanding Contributions to Science in Trauma Psychology from the American Psychological Association’s Trauma Division. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She currently serves as the Editor of the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation.

November 2, 2013 Comments Off on Jerry Sandusky asks Pennsylvania high court to take case, Blind to betrayal: Why we fool ourselves we aren’t being fooled – Book Review

Jerry Sandusky asks Pennsylvania high court to take case
AP November 1, 2013
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Jerry Sandusky wants Pennsylvania’s highest court to take up his appeal of a 45-count child sex abuse conviction, saying in a petition released Friday that the trial judge should have instructed jurors regarding the length of time it took his victims to come forward.

The new filing also repeated other arguments that were recently rejected by the mid-level Superior Court, including a claim that Sandusky’s lawyers lacked sufficient time to prepare and that a prosecutor improperly referred to Sandusky’s decision not to testify….

The petition argues that Judge John Cleland’s decision not to issue the “failure to make a prompt report” jury instruction was catastrophic to the defense strategy….

The defense lawyers said most of the eight young men who testified against Sandusky waited years to disclose the abuse, although one told his mother about showering with Sandusky the same day. The others ranged from two to 16 years, they wrote.

BLIND TO BETRAYAL: WHY WE FOOL OURSELVES WE AREN’T BEING FOOLED by Jennifer J. Freyd and Pamela J. Birrell
(Wiley, 2013). Molly Dragiewicz, Queensland Institute of Technology The Criminologist The Official Newsletter of the American Society of Criminology Vol. 38, No. 5, September/October 2013 p. 60-61

Jennifer Freyd and Pamela Birrell’s “Blind to betrayal: Why we fool ourselves we aren’t being fooled”….expands upon Freyd’s earlier work on betrayal trauma theory (Freyd, 1996; Smith & Freyd, 2013)….However, the most interesting contribution of the book for criminologists may well be the authors’ attention to the relationship of power to the social construction of reality. The authors argue that vulnerability to or dependency on the perpetrator contributes to failures of recognition of abuse. In other words, targets of abuse may be “blind” to the harm being done to them while it is unsafe to recognize it. As a result, some memories of abuse are visible only later, when they attain the resources to survive the trauma.

Recent scholarship has highlighted the connections between psychological phenomena like individual perceptions of reality and the collective power relations that shape them (Salter, 2012; Zurbriggen, 2009). As critical scholars argue, pervasive forms of violence and abuse serve to reproduce social hierarchies, reinforcing some hegemonic community values even as they transgressother social norms. Like Stanley Cohen’s earlier book, States of Denial (2001), Blind to Betrayal examines victim, perpetrator, and bystander denial of horrific events and traces connections between psychology, culture, and politics. Freyd and Birrell argue that “betrayal blindness means not seeing what is there to be seen” (p. 1) and emphasize the way that betrayal and vulnerability shape the experience of trauma.

Using examples from popular culture and research, the authors illustrate the dynamics of interpersonal and institutional betrayal in a range of contexts. The book describes Freyd’s two-dimensional model for traumatic events, which incorporates the extentto which events are terror or fear inducing and the level of social betrayal involved. The authors argue that events that are both terror or fear inducing and high in social betrayal are the most traumatic (p. 57). Thus, Freyd and Birrell stress the multiplication of trauma by social betrayal. They also note the gendered nature of the phenomenon, wherein “betrayal traumas are frequent, particularly for girls and women” (p. 58). This observation agrees with other scholarship on the routine negation of girls’ and women’s accounts of abuse (Richie, 2012; Salter, 2012).

….Page 61

One of the most important parts of the book is found in Chapters 10 and 13 where Freyd and Birrell discuss the phenomenon of scholars’ participation in organized resistance to the disclosure of violence and abuse. Freyd uses the example of her ownexperience, in which her mother created a non-profit organization called The False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) in response to learning that Jennifer Freyd had disclosed her experience of childhood abuse to her partner. The FMSF website says, The False Memory Syndrome Foundation was formed by a group of accused families and several professionals at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Johns Hopkins Medical Institution in Baltimore. This nuclear group had come together with other families to try to figure out what had happened to cause the dramatic change of behavior in their now-adult children, to try to cope with the pain from the loss of their children and to address the legal nightmare of being accused of abuse. (The False Memory Syndrome Foundation, n.d.)

The organization has an advisory board made of up PhDs who share a belief in “implanted” and “false memories.” They advocate for those who claim they have been falsely accused, and promote research that allegedly shows disclosures of abuse are not credible, especially when delayed. This example of scholars mobilizing to discredit survivors of abuse is not unique. Criminologists rarely discuss the role of self-interest among scholars who may be perpetrators as well as survivors of violence and abuse. However, it is a mathematical certainty that some scholars are indeed perpetrators of violence and abuse. Freyd’s discussion of the harassment and discrediting tactics of the FMSF, including recruiting her own colleagues in the campaign to discredit her, will probably be familiar to some ASC members. Freyd and Birrell’s discussion of these dynamics took courage, since scholars who talk about campaigns against them are sometimes silenced when attempts to defend themselves result in claims of ad hominem attacks….http://www.academia.edu/4562139/Book_review_Blind_to_Betrayal_by_Freyd_and_Birrell

Betrayal is fundamental to the human condition. Betrayal is everywhere and yet because of betrayal blindness often not seen. Drawing on empirical research, clinical thought, and real stories, we will explore with the reader central questions about betrayal and betrayal blindness: What is betrayal? What is its scope? Why are we often blind to it? What are the mental mechanisms that underlie betrayal blindness? What are the effects of betrayal blindness? How should we overcome the effects of betrayal and our blindness to it? How do we become aware of it and heal from its effects? We can create a better world together by facing betrayal and learning to trust ourselves and each other. https://sites.google.com/site/betrayalbook/the-book

Blind to Betrayal Preface
“Betrayal violates us. It can destroy relationships and the very trust we need to be intimate in our relationships. It can and does damage the social fabric that creates the bonds for a healthy society.

In the case of children, the effects can last a lifetime. Betrayed children may grow into adults who fail to trust the trustworthy or who too readily trust people who further betray them. Whether being too willing or too unwilling to trust, difficulty with trust not only interferes with relationships, but also eats away at a strong sense of self. Those who were betrayed as children often suffer severe self esteem problems, as well as depression, anxiety, and even psychosis.”http://dynamic.uoregon.edu/~jjf/blindtobetrayalpreface.pdf

Blind to Betrayal – Chapter 1
“betrayal occurs in many domains besides infidelity. People can be betrayed at work, in the family, and in society. Betrayal can occur at the individual and at the societal level. Betrayal can be the act of a terrorist or the act of a friend. Parents can betray by abandoning or abusing their children. Treason is betrayal. Social injustice and oppression often entail betrayal and betrayal blindness, as will be illustrated in the next chapter by the case of Kevin, who remained blind to being a victim of racial discrimination for so many years. Although not all betrayal involves blindness, ongoing or repeated betrayal is intrinsically linked with unawareness.
Ongoing betrayal can occur only when there is some deception that is not fully detected.”http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/09/04706044/0470604409-124.pdf

Speaking Our Truth – Chapter 13 Discusses Jennifer Freyd’s presentation at a professional conference “Personal and Theoretical Perspectives on the Delayed Memory Debate.” She discusses her personal relationship with her parents, their false memory organization and her accounts of privacy violations and inappropriate relationships.

Blind to Betrayal March 11th, 2013
Professor Jennifer Freyd has a new book with Pamela Birrell called Blind to Betrayal. The book, officially published today, explores various case studies involving betrayal, its effects and how victims come to grips with it. Most relevant to the Recovered Memory Project is the chapter about the False Memory Syndrome….http://blogs.brown.edu/recoveredmemory/2013/03/11/blind-to-betrayal/

Recidivism: How often do Child Molesters go on to Reoffend?

Some people claim that child abusers can’t be cured and invariably reoffend. Others suggest that recidivism rates are low and that sex offenders are less likely to reoffend than those who commit other types of crimes. What is the truth?

Overall, follow-up studies typically find sexual recidivism rates of 10%-15% after five years, 20% after 10 years, and 30%-40% after 20 years (see, Hanson, Morton, & Harris, 2003).

However, these numbers are conservative because not all offences are detected….

The vast majority of sex offenses are never reported. For instance, the National Women’s Study surveyed a representative sample of over 4,000 adult women in the United States . Three hundred forty-one (8.5%) of these women were victims of at least one rape prior to the age of 18; however, only 11.9% of these women reported the rape to authorities (Hanson et al., 1990). And it must be remembered, of the few offenses reported, an even smaller number result in convictions.http://www.leadershipcouncil.org/1/res/rcd.html

– Pursuit of Truth Film
Adult Survivors Of Child Sex Abuse Seeking Justice
“a court system weighted in favor of perpetrators combine to make it extremely difficult for survivors to successfully assert their legal rights and far too easy for perpetrators to walk free and continue to abuse other children”

Federal police have smashed what they allege is one of the largest online child abuse networks they’ve seen, arresting twenty one people, confiscating hundreds of thousands of child abuse images and reportedly rescuing a young victim of the network….

A dispiriting sign of the times is human fallibility associated with hitherto “safe” environments. Previously sacrosanct institutions – universities, the military, the church, scouts — are now headline news for the wrong reason.

Researchers are now learning that recovery from sexual trauma is more challenging when an individual has been betrayed by a perpetrator within a conceptually secure setting.

In a study of 345 female university students, University of Oregon researchers found that 233 of them had experienced at least one unwanted sexual experience in their lifetime, and 46 percent of those victims also experienced betrayal by the institution where incidents occurred.

In the final analysis, researchers found, those who experienced institutional betrayal suffered the most in four post-trauma measurement categories, including anxiety and dissociation.

In the study which appears in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, investigators used a 10-item analysis tool — the Institutional Betrayal Questionnaire — to assess institutional betrayal and involvement.

“Our work on institutional betrayal has coincided with increased public awareness of the harm inflicted by unresponsive institutions surrounding traumatic events,” said researcher Jennifer J. Freyd, Ph.D….

Adult Survivors Of Child Sex Abuse Seeking Justice
Child sexual abuse (CSA) is a crime that is committed behind closed doors without witnesses and remains in the dark because children typically are unable to speak about their abuse. This inability to come forward frequently continues into adulthood. Regrettably, close to 90% of cases go unreported. Thus, despite its epidemic proportions in this country – at least 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 5 boys likely to be abused before age 18 – CSA remains in the shadows, hidden from the wheels of our justice system.

The legal system itself must share responsibility for such tragic underreporting. As presently constituted, the legal process constructs unfair barriers for survivors to overcome to achieve justice against their abusers. Unjust laws– including arbitrary statutes of limitations (SOL’s) that effectively bar 60%-70% of survivors’ cases from even being filed, erratic police/prosecution practices, and a court system weighted in favor of perpetrators combine to make it extremely difficult for survivors to successfully assert their legal rights and far too easy for perpetrators to walk free and continue to abuse other children.

But winds of change are stirring. There is a growing movement to change the justice’s system fundamental approach to survivors’ cases. Reformers in a number of states have either eliminated SOL’s or expanded the filing deadlines substantially. Activists are shining the light on the need to transform the handling of survivors’ cases by police, prosecutors, and courts so that justice can become a reality for survivors.http://www.pursuitoftruthfilm.com/

– Theoretical and Personal Perspectives on the Delayed Memory Debate By Jennifer J. Freyd
– 15-Year-Old Girl Raped, Police Dismiss the Case Because Victim and Attackers Have “Low IQs”
– Torso of African boy detectives believe was killed in a ritual sacrifice before being tossed into the Thames is ‘identified’ by key witness
– Sister’s persistence leads to murder charges
– Smashed: The sex-slave cult where women were ‘forced to sleep with men claiming to be reincarnation of Christ’ on Mexico-US border
– Konstantin Rudnev: Russian cult leader jailed for sex abuse

Theoretical and Personal Perspectives on the Delayed Memory Debate By Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403

….As many of you know, the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (FMSF) was founded and is now directed by, my mother, Pamela Freyd.

It is widely known that my parents claim to be “falsely accused” of the sexual abuse by their daughter. Numerous newspaper stories about the FMSF have presented my parents’ status as falsely accused.

Just last month, on the NPR evening radio news show “All Things Considered” the reporter, Wendy Schmelzer, said “For the last year, Dr. Freyd has criss-crossed the country attending similar meetings; each time with the same message for her audience –– ‘you are not alone. My husband and I were also falsely accused.'” I am the daughter they claim has falsely accused them.

Not only is it widely known that my parents were accused of sexual abuse, and not only is it widely assumed that the accusations was “false”, but the details of their story are also –– most strangely –– widely known. My mother published her version of being falsely accused under the name “Jane Doe” and this published story has been circulated widely. Many people learn the story without knowing the identity of the characters, but believing the details to be accurate. I find the latter situation unnerving; I find the former situation –– where people get exposed to Jane Doe thinking it is about me –– horribly invasive and violating. As one clinician said at a national meeting recently about the FMSF: “there is persuasive evidence that this organization grew out of one family’s feud that’s overgrown its boundaries and come into the popular culture.”

In speaking about personal matters today, I would like to offer my truth in hopes that it will inform you of aspects of the context out of which FMSF grew. I would never have chosen to be here today speaking about my personal life, were circumstances not what they are. I make this decision partly because I have already lost so much of my privacy, and in such an unclear and distorted way, that I have come to desire clarity and public truth as the lesser of two undesirable situations. I also speak about these matters today because I hope what I have to share will help, directly or indirectly, other abused children and adult survivors of abuse. I hope that speaking my truth is, in the end, healing for myself and for others.

The truth I wish to speak about today pertains to patterns of behaviors. I will speak about a pattern of behavior my parents have exhibited towards me in my childhood and continuing into the present: A pattern of boundary violations, a pattern of invasion and control, a pattern of inappropriate and unwanted sexualization, a pattern of family and relationship dysfunction, and a pattern of intimidation and manipulation….http://theawarenesscenter.blogspot.com/1993/08/theoretical-and-personal-perspectives.html

In some of the most disturbing and sickening news of the day, New York state police have decided that a 15-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by three boys was in fact not sexually assaulted because both she and the boys are mentally handicapped.

In May of last year, three boys attacked a 15-year-old mentally challenged student at Martin De Porres Academy, a school for students with special needs in Long Island. According to the police report, one of the boys repeatedly banged her head against the table while the other two forced her to give them oral sex and then tried to have forcible anal sex with her. In interviews with the police, the girl explained how she repeatedly said “no” and “stop” but that the boys continued to assault her. When she came home from school that day, her mother noticed that she had blood on her underwear.

But the Nassau County Police Department recently decided to drop the case after learning that the boys also had learning disabilities and mental handicaps, which apparently made the situation far too complicated for the police department.

The department’s spokesperson told the New York Daily News , “It was more of a consensual situation with their mental capabilities.”

Torso of African boy detectives believe was killed in a ritual sacrifice before being tossed into the Thames is ‘identified’ by key witness Torso named Adam by detectives has been ‘revealed’ as Nigerian-born Patrick Erhabor
John Hall Thursday 07 February 2013

A torso found in the Thames, which detectives believe belongs to an African boy murdered in a ritual sacrifice, has reportedly been identified by a key witness.

Speaking to BBC News, Joyce Osagiede said the child was Nigerian-born Patrick Erhabor – a child she claims to have looked after in Germany before he was trafficked to the UK.

Ms Osagiede went on to say she had handed the boy over to a bogus asylum seeker and convicted people smuggler called Kingsley Ojo, who was deported back to Nigeria despite having offered to help with the inquiry.

The BBC said there is no evidence to suggest Ojo was involved in the murder or knew what would happen to the boy, however, and Ojo has always denied having anything to do with the killing.

Sister’s persistence leads to murder charges
Fullerton detectives question a convicted murderer, who confesses to killing 3 men in 1981-82 and disposing of the bodies in what he called a Tibetan sky burial ritual. Feb. 13, 2013

By LARRY WELBORN / ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Kathy Tessanne never let it go.

Every so often for more than 30 years, Tessanne contacted Fullerton police and asked if there was any new information on a 1982 missing person case….

Last week, Fullerton police detectives gave Tessanne and her siblings grim but not unexpected news.

DNA tests conducted by the Orange County crime lab revealed that a partial skull found by hikers in 1985 near Big Bear has been identified as belonging to Frank Bartlett Marshall, Tessanne’s long-missing foster brother.

The detectives weren’t finished: the skull, they explained, had a bullet hole in it, confirming her worst fears. Marshall, who was last seen when he drove his motorcycle away from her family’s Fullerton home on Jan. 2, 1982, had been murdered.

The detectives had more.

New evidence led them to question a convicted killer serving two life terms for two murders of young men who had disappeared in very similar circumstances from Fullerton in late 1981.

Smashed: The sex-slave cult where women were ‘forced to sleep with men claiming to be reincarnation of Christ’ on Mexico-US border
Cult was called the ‘Defensores de Cristo’ or ‘Defenders of Christ’
It allegedly recruited women to have sex with a Spanish man
Authorities raided house across the border from Laredo, Texas
By Leon Watson 30 January 2013
Mexican officials broke up a bizarre cult that allegedly ran a sex-slavery ring among its followers on the U.S. border, Mexican immigration authorities revealed today.

The ‘Defensores de Cristo’ or ‘Defenders of Christ’ allegedly recruited women to have sex with a Spanish man who claimed he was the reincarnation of Christ, according to an official of a victims’ advocacy group.

Followers were subjected to forced labor or sexual services, including prostitution, according to the National Immigration Institute that said it filed a complaint more than a year ago about the cult.

Federal police, agents of Mexico’s National Immigration Institute and prosecutors raided a house earlier this week near Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas, and found cult members, including children, living in filthy conditions, according to the institute official….

But according to the cult’s website, the leader was Spaniard Ignacio Gonzalez de Arriba. He set up shop in Mexico about three years ago, after a stint in Brazil and other parts of South America, said Myrna Garcia, an activist with the Support Network for Cult Victims who has worked with victims of the Defenders of Christ cult.

He became involved in offering courses on ‘bio-programming,’ an esoteric practice that claims to allow practicants to ‘reprogram’ their brains to eliminate pain, suffering and anxiety, according to institute….

Konstantin Rudnev: Russian cult leader jailed for sex abuse
A Russian cult leader who described himself as an “extra-terrestrial from Sirius” has been jailed for 11 years for sexually abusing his followers.
By Tom Parfitt, Moscow 08 Feb 2013

Konstantin Rudnev, 45, was convicted in a closed trial in Siberia of rape, drug trafficking, sexual assault and “creating an organisation that infringes on people’s personality and rights”.

It was the end of an extraordinary and bizarre journey for the self-proclaimed prophet, who also went under the moniker Great Shaman Shri Dzhnan Avatar Muni.

The former steelworker founded his strict, hierarchical cult called Ashram Shambala in the city of Novosibirsk in the late 1980s, cheating converts out of their belongings in exchange for a potpourri of esoteric and occultist teachings and the chance to “clean their energy channels” in mystical rituals.

The cult grew rapidly, acquiring up to 20,000 followers at ashrams across Russia….

Followers of the cult were persuaded to sell their apartments and cars and hand over the cash, while breaking links with their relatives.

“Psychological pressure was put on the adherents,” said Irina Zebrova, a Federal Security Service (FSB) spokesperson. “They were forced to unquestioningly follow the commands of the leader of the sect. People were punished with lack of food and sleep.”